Dominican Nightclub collapse: Survivor recalls ‘total chaos’

At 01:00 on Tuesday morning Carwin Javier Molleja was dancing with his mother in Santo Domingo’s Jet Set nightclub when he noticed something fall from the ceiling.

At the time, he didn’t think much of it. “No-one thought that because a small stone fell the entire roof was going to collapse,” he says.

The percussionist, who had moved to the Dominican Republic eight years earlier, was out with his mother, Carmen, and friends to see a concert by merengue singer Rubby Pérez.

It was the first time Carwin, 32, and his mother had seen each other in three years and it was meant to be a night of joy and celebration.

But in the early hours of Tuesday morning, disaster struck.

“What I have in my head are the screams, the loud sound of the ceiling falling in, my mum’s screams asking me if I’m OK, me asking her if she’s OK,” Carwin recalls.

“Everything happened so fast. I guess I closed my eyes and my instinct was to hug my mum.”

Both Carwin and his mother, who had been standing near the stage, were struck on the head by pieces of falling ceiling, but were lucky to avoid serious injury. Rubby Perez was among those killed.

In the chaos that quickly unfolded, Carwin managed to find a door through which he and his mother escaped outside.

But his friend Jessica and her sister were still in the club. Desperate to find them, he decided to go back inside.

Inside the club, Carwin desperately shouted Jessica’s name but no one answered.

He says he felt powerless to help those who had become trapped under the debris.

“The stones were huge. I felt useless.”

Carwin says he then repeatedly went out of the building, where he’d try to call paramedics, then return inside to shout his friend’s name and call her phone.

“After that, the calls stopped going through.”

Carwin describes the aftermath of the collapse as “total chaos”.

“People were going crazy,” he says.

“They were pulling out injured people. I saw when they pulled out the saxophonist who died.”

Within minutes of the collapse, emergency services arrived, as ambulances and stretchers “kept coming”.

Carwin says he remained at the scene for about an hour and a half after the collapse.

In that time, he says he didn’t see any machinery arriving to remove the debris.

He says he wanted to continue trying to find his friend, but needed to take home his mother, who was in pain.

“I needed to get her home and calm her down.”

Later that day, Jessica and her sister’s lifeless bodies were found among the rubble. At least 221 people were killed in the disaster.

Carwin says he regrets not having been able to do more for his friend.

“It was horrible not being able to help her. I yelled her name, but she didn’t answer. It feels awful not being able to do anything.”

With reporting by Isabel Caro and Alicia Hernández.